At 12:31, the chartered jet landed at the small airport on Camino Island, ten minutes from downtown Santa Rosa. Rick and Graham were there to meet Elaine and her two associates. Two SUVs picked up Bradshaw and his crew. Because it was Monday, hotel rooms were available, for a few days anyway, and several had been reserved at a hotel near the harbor, less than a five-minute walk from the bookstore. Bradshaw took the largest suite and set up his command post. Laptops were arranged on a table, and the video surveillance from the cameras ran nonstop.

After a quick lunch, Mercer arrived at the suite and a flurry of introductions followed. She was startled at the show of manpower, and felt ill with the thought that she had unleashed all these people on an unsuspecting Bruce Cable.

With Elaine in the background, she was interrogated by Bradshaw and another special agent named Vanno. She retold her story, leaving out nothing but the intimate details of her long weekend, a rather romantic little fling that now seemed like a nostalgic romp from long ago. Bradshaw walked her through a series of high-density photographs of the Fitzgerald manuscripts taken years earlier by Princeton. Elaine had the same set and Mercer had seen it all before. Yes, yes, in her opinion, what she had seen last night in the basement vault was the original Tycoon.

Yes, it could be a fake. Anything is possible, but she didn’t think so. Why would Bruce be so protective of a fake manuscript?

When Bradshaw repeated a question for the third time, and did so with a tone of suspicion, Mercer bristled and asked, “Aren’t we on the same team here?”

Vanno eased in with a soft “Of course we are, Mercer, we just need to get everything right.”

“I got it right, okay?”

After an hour of back-and-forth, Mercer was convinced that Elaine Shelby was smarter and much smoother than Bradshaw and Vanno. Elaine, though, had handed her off to the FBI, and there was no doubt they would run the show until the end. During a break, Bradshaw took a call from an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Jacksonville and things got tense. It seemed as though the federal magistrate there was insisting on a closed hearing with “the witness” present, as opposed to allowing “the witness” to testify by video. This upset Bradshaw and Vanno, but they got nowhere.

At 2:15, Mercer was loaded into a car with Rick behind the wheel and Graham riding shotgun and Elaine in the rear seat with her. They followed an SUV loaded with FBI agents off the island and in the direction of Jacksonville. On the bridge over the Camino River, Mercer broke the ice with an unpleasant “So, let’s have it. What’s going on?”

Rick and Graham stared straight ahead and said nothing. Elaine cleared her throat and said, “It’s all federal crap, your tax dollars at work. Federal Agent Bradshaw is pissed off at the U.S. Attorney for this district, he’s federal too, and everybody seems pissed off at the federal magistrate, who does the search warrants. They thought they had an understanding whereby you could stay on the island and give your statement by video. Bradshaw says they do it all the time, but for some reason this federal magistrate wants to hear you in person. So, we’re headed for court.”